It’s something akin to living ‘others' truths’ versus living ‘your own truth’!

'An Interesting Process of Discovery' 

Practices of insightful, focused, intense and attentive reading have a lot of benefits galore for the avid reader! They not only help create personal and cultural insights for the curious eye, but also help gain for oneself amazing facets of imagination and invention beyond the utmost bounds of one’s ‘blinkered’ and ‘tinkered’ domains of knowledge!

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man speaks to a similar story of the growth and development of its protagonist Stephen Dedalus in like fashion!

Each of the five sections beautifully portrays a portrait of how the artist in Dedalus evolves over a period of time, by walking ahead, in leaps and bounds, on the road towards knowledge and experience!

It’s something akin to living ‘others' truths’ versus living ‘your own truth’ by thinking and reasoning it out for oneself, outside the box, or something to the likes of thinking beyond the bounds of society’s truth, or a family’s truth, or a parent’s truth, or a friend’s truth, or a sibling's truth, or a religion’s truth, etc!

Once Dedalus (we should bring to our mind here, the fact that, Joyce himself once admitted that, he saw Dedalus in himself!) is able to reason out thus, and think ‘his own truths,’ all for himself, he is able to shape a reality of his own freewill outside the dogmatic axioms that have ‘constructed’ versions of realities for him thus far! Hence it is, that he sets out to create a theory of aesthetics that will manoeuvre life and living for him from thence on!

What a beautiful way of steering one’s life forward, ain’t it? And this he does, with such gusto, in his company of books and literature!

And through each stage of his crisis, his mental development, that moves on from innocence to experience, reveals to the reader, an interesting process of discovery that is at the heart of one’s reading!

Hence, thinking literature, reading literature, breathing literature, and feeling literature real helps in enhancing one’s own experience, enabling him/her to shape their own realities outside the dogmatized axioms, and to create theories of aesthetics that will help propel one’s life to realms thus far unfathomed and hitherto unknown to the rest of the world!

Like a gardener who is devoted to her garden, keeps thinking about it all of the time, and makes all her ‘spare’ time as ‘care’ time, tending to her garden, in the interests of her garden, a good reader too likewise, attends to his reading, much akin to the likes of gardening! With such dedicated attention, committed devotion, enriching the garden with all possible nourishment and cherishment all along! In fact, reading, like gardening, is then, a continuous process!

It is here that Med’s delightful takes on reading assumes such interesting significance for us all!

His tips, in this regard, are worthy of a hugey high fiveyyy!

Here goes from what Med has said -

If your learning requires that you do a great deal of reading, here are some tips to help you absorb what you have read:

1. Relate what you read to your own experiences. Slower, more accurate learning is often faster than a speedy effort. You would be wise to think of specific examples that will relate to your studies as you read, rather than just rush to complete each chapter.

2. Take a break when you feel the need for one. This often gives the information time to sink in.

3. Provide yourself with periods of relaxation after attempting some very ‘heavy’ learning. The more complete your relaxation the better, since upsets may cause you to fail to retain your new-found knowledge.

4. Stop studying when you get tired. Learning slows down when fatigue steps in.

5. Use every possible aid to help you absorb information. If possible, turn off the phone. If you are working at a desk, see that it is neither too low or too high so that your body must assume an uncomfortable position. 

Don’t use a chair that is too soft, because learning is something we usually consider a chore, and we may begin to doze off if the chair is too comfortable. Have a good reading light properly placed over your shoulder or over the desk and focused right on the paper. Remember, too, that a temperature of 68 – 70 degrees with humidity at 50 per cent is best for you to stay alert.

6. Your pencil or pen can also be a very valuable study aid. As you read, underline what you think important. Underlining offers you two major rewards. First, you are compelled to stay mentally alert so that you are more apt to find the important. Second, underlining helps you review. The underlined high spots are quickly spotted and digested.

The best way to use your pencil or pen for underlining are:

1. Underline topic sentences, key words, and phrases as you read.

2. If you find a series of sentences or paragraphs you want to remember, draw a vertical line to the right or left of this material.

3. If questions or thoughts are raised in your mind by the text, note them in the margins. These notations will serve as a reminder or memory-jogger when you reread the material.

Excerpted from Med Serif’s How to Manage Yourself